Friday, 30 December 2011

JamVM no claim to notability?

JamVM has a wikipedia page. I didn't create it, and I'm not egotistical enough to maintain it in any way. However, I was less than impressed to see that somebody had taken it upon themselves to put the page forward for deletion. The reasons being that it hasn't had a recent release, and that it has no claim to notability.

I have tried to show that neither of these claims are true. For example, JamVM is the default VM on Ubuntu/ARM 11.10. I think this is both notable and recent! However, this doesn't seem to count, the debate being fixated on a claim on the page regarding Dalvik from a blog.

To be honest, I'm so disgusted with the process that I no longer care if the page is deleted. But if anybody else cares, please put a word in for JamVM.

Their assertion (quoting from the deletion page) that "Only claim to notability is based on an allegation from a blog that Google copied it", seems to be a strange stance to take given that there is ample secondary sources which reference JamVM, and AFAIK no-one has ever claimed the allegation referred to above makes JamVM notable. In other words their rationale for deleting JamVM seems to have no basis in fact whatsoever.

So what is going on here? One cannot help but being reminded of Displacement. In other words they seem to be so scared of (to quote from the deletion page) "potentially making a serious allegation" they want to remove the page on JamVM, but rather than admit to this, they're pretending the issue is one of notability.

I leave it to others to draw their own conclusions as to what this means for the credibility of wikipedia's deletion process.

Sadly once a Wikipedia deletionist gets hold of an article it seems doomed :{ There is a strange bureaucratic process around deletions of articles.

I added some comments to the talk page, but adding those now might actually make things worse :{ They might seen as vandalism by sock or meat puppets.

Really, they call "outside experts" that way if they add something to an article after it is marked for deletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Sockpuppeting_is_not_to_be_tolerated

Also I am surprised that people question that early versions of Android were based on JamVM. I thought that was common knowledge. Early documentation explicitly mentioned JamVM as the runtime used. See for example: http://web.archive.org/web/20091027081958/http://pdk.android.com/online-pdk/guide/debugging_native.html

Wikipedia is simply a corporate blog that pretends to be a (public) encyclopedia.

Once you understand that (usually the first-hand hard way) everything is clear:

- the systematic (plain) lies, - you have to reply to 6-10 "accounts", - the censorship of your arguments, - etc.

This explains why technically inferior solutions (promoted by BigCos or their 'partners' or even ex-employees which are then 'independent' consultants) are allowed to be listed while others (the only ones really deserving "notability") are eradicated.

With all the hubub about raspberry pi, I've been looking for a suitable jvm that I could compile on it. Just curious if development is still going on for jamvm, it'd be really neat to see a 1.6 release. I don't want to sound like a free loading praise happy freetard, but you've done great work... Do you accept free (as in beer) donations????

I only just saw this blog, so too late to vote in JamVM's favour, but I have to concur that the cretinous behaviour of their deleters baffles me. They are happy to remove pages on software projects with well-established multi-year public development cycles, yet keep intricate details about obscure X Factor contestants. Anyway...

There is a little irony in your comment in that you complain about them not picking up on work on JamVM because there aren't new releases, but then completely miss that work on GNU Classpath is ongoing and there has been a release much more recently than your quote: https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=7156 (2012-03-16) and I'm planning a 0.99.1 soon.

I admit the main GNU Classpath web pages are up-to-date with this, but that's mainly because it uses some obscure wml tool to update, which, as it's now unmaintained, means I basically need to get round to maintaining and building that before I can update them. The page is easy enough to find via Google.

Speaking as both GNU Classpath & IcedTea maintainer, I'd prefer we had JamVM releases (we did FINALLY get a CACAO one). The current situation has evolved not through planning, but through need. We needed something newer with both CACAO & JamVM to work with OpenJDK so we built against snapshots in releases as we do in development.

This is fine for when IcedTea is in development, but for a release, I'd prefer we had an equivalent release on the CACAO/JamVM side as once a release is out there, the version used is not going to change. So you should expect users to be testing against what was in a release, not the latest and greatest hg/git snapshot as in http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1266